On Wednesday, April 28, Stevens began the annual Innovation Expo with previews of senior design projects in the Canavan Arena on campus. Following the in-person event, a virtual event was held on April 30 featuring more senior projects in a virtual setting. Both events began with opening remarks from President Nariman Farvardin and Provost Christophe Pierre.
The in-person event focused on highlighting senior projects from the Schaefer School of Engineering and Science, the School of Systems and Enterprises, and the College of Arts and Letters. The online event featured projects from the same as well as the School of Business; a concert (A Living Room Concert) by the Music & Technology program was also performed through Zoom, as well as a research experience by faculty for middle and high schoolers and a Q&A session with the pitch competition judges. The Stute reached out to some seniors for a deeper look into their experience with their senior design projects.
Computer Engineering major Jennifer Lloyd and Andrew Antonacci, as well as Mechanical Engineering major Sarah Bertussi, worked together to create “BeatBot.” Lloyd explained, “We’ve designed a software package for robot combat vehicles (RCV) to enable them to go into any environment without an operator/tether, WIFI, or GPS signal to explore and autonomously generate a detailed 3D map.” The project was broken up into four milestones: “project scope and customer needs … project plan and concept … alpha prototype … beta prototype.” Lloyd addressed that working virtually was definitely a challenge. She would work on Zoom with her teammates using both her phone and laptop so she could show them what she was doing with the robot. She explained that they definitely could have made a lot more progress working in person, but they eventually met in a large gym setting to do a full test run on the robot. Lloyd stated that she “couldn’t have asked for a better team to work with on this project.”
Business and Technology students Olivia Scott and Kaylee Gardner worked with Finance students Hava Mamudi, Jason Coyle, and Yiwen Zhao to create “Music TBD.” Gardner explained, “We have developed an application focused on music discovery and better connecting independent musicians with fans and music professionals.” Gardner noted that independent artists find it difficult to build a fanbase and make a profit. She stated, “The app allows fans to discover music through a more personal dating-app style discover page and a curated recommendations page based on their genre, location, trending artists, and more. They can also share music with their friends and find upcoming music events too.” While the app is free for fans, artists will pay a monthly subscription. Scott explained that her team was living all over the world, so the benefit of working virtually was being able to see each other through the screen. Gardner highlighted that with Zhao living in China, finding meeting times that worked for everyone was a challenge. Scott said, “We really wanted to tie our passion for music into our project … we’re really grateful we had a good team and we made it work.”
Social Sciences major Laina Emmons created a senior thesis focusing on “A county-level analysis of how COVID-19 infection and death rate in the U.S. impacted Presidential and Gubernatorial incumbent reelection.” She worked alone with the help of her advisor Dr. Lindsey Cormack, and she has been working on this project since April of 2020. Emmons explained that “Previous literature suggests that voters hold incumbents accountable for their natural disaster policy response by either rewarding a satisfactory response with reelection and vice versa.” With regard to increasing death and infection rates due to COVID-19, Emmons analyzed the outcome of the presidential election and six Republican gubernatorial elections. She also took into consideration “if voters punish the President and Governors differently based on varying responsibility for pandemic fallout.” Emmons said, “I used an exploratory analysis method with correlation charts and multiple regression analyses I programmed using R.” A challenge Emmons faced was data collection, as she did everything from scratch which included manually collecting election results and COVID-19 statistics.
While working virtually was a challenge, Stevens seniors worked hard to push their senior design projects forward and create interesting solutions. To learn more about different projects and events, click here.
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